


of anything ever again

by endquestionmark



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-17
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-23 09:23:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3762856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“This is going to hurt,” she says, and presses against the bruise firmly with two fingers. Matt makes a noise, choked-off in his throat, and she can almost see him focusing and suppressing a reflexive recoil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	of anything ever again

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for [this prompt](https://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/725.html?thread=4053#cmt4053) but Catholicism got in the way. Written to a soundtrack of "Gold Trans Am" and Agnus Dei. Not nearly as nasty as it should have been. If you egged me on, you know who you are, you motherfuckers. I feel way too holy right now.

There are good nights and bad nights. On bad nights, Claire’s pulled doubles in ICU, burning through her complement of breaks in the first five hours of each shift and powering herself through until her second shift starts with a combination of willpower and sheer stubbornness. She has friends from nursing school, though she’s lost touch with them for the most part, who tell her that this is relatively rare, and usually only happens in crisis situations. Post-incident Hell’s Kitchen is an ongoing crisis situation, so this makes more sense than she’d like to admit. There are fewer and fewer good nights these days, with the hospital in borderline violation of safe staffing practices. Hell’s Kitchen isn’t cruel — it’s never been cruel — but it is absolutely unforgiving and unpredictable. Nobody lasts in Hell’s Kitchen without learning to roll with the punches and just keep getting back up.

Claire once heard Matt refer to himself as “Hell’s Kitchen born and bred”. The rest of the saying, as she’s always heard it, goes “wed and dead”, and she’s pretty sure about which one is going to preempt the other. There’s a certain degree of self-immolation involved in being a nurse, especially in Metro General, but she’s never met someone as hell-bent on burning himself out and up for a city that’ll turn on him as soon as he slips as Matt. From what she can tell, Matt has never let himself be knocked down in his entire life, and he gets back up from blows which should land him in her ER like it’s his day job.

He’s lucky it’s a good night when he taps on her window. Claire’s never been a heavy sleeper, except for the twelve hours following a double; she’s used to being shaken awake in the break room after five minutes of breathing room, or jolting upright when her phone buzzes in her pocket. She’s doubly wary these days, the memory of a fake badge and a fire extinguisher ever-present in her mind, and even with all the lights on it feels like there are dark corners in her apartment that she’ll never entirely chase away.

Anyway, there’s a familiar shadow on her fire escape, and she unlocks the window and lets Matt in. She might not be able to taste copper the way he does, especially given the amount of blood she’s around on a daily basis, but usually it’s easy enough to tell how badly he’s banged up by whether or not he’s literally holding in his guts. He’s not leaving footprints of his own blood, which is generally a good sign, but he winces when he sinks onto her sofa, shedding his gloves on the end table, and even with the floor lamp off there’s a telltale shadow curving out from under the mask, cresting along his right cheekbone. Matt relaxes into a smile, and then freezes, fresh blood trickling from the split lip he’s just reopened.

“Most guys bring flowers,” Claire says drily.

“Florist’s was closed,” Matt says.

That’s what he’s always like, whether it’s a good night or a bad one; quick with the quips and the deflection, and always in a way that leaves her suppressing a smile.

“Okay,” she says, digging the box of gloves and her work kit off the top shelf of her closet and clicking on the kitchen light, tugging down her shorts. “Come here, let’s see what you’ve done to yourself this time.” Matt pulls out a chair at the tiny patio table she’s repurposed and settles in, back straight, limbs loose, and she rolls her shoulders, takes a breath, and steps in.

When he pulls the mask off, she doesn’t react, because she’s seen much worse, but that also means she’s aware of how the swelling around his orbital bone must feel. It’s already clotted dark red, and she places her fingers at the very edge of the bruising, slowly and gently. “I’m going to check this out for a fracture,” Claire says, half a question. “Supraorbital rim looks pretty banged up—” here Matt raises an eyebrow, and while he doesn’t wince either, she can tell by the tightening of his jaw that he’s definitely feeling it “—that’s here,” she adds, and ghosts her fingers up to where she would normally be able to press and feel bone right below his right brow.

“What would you do if it was broken?” Matt enquires.

“Kiss it better,” she parries, and then deflects even harder. There’s no muscle entrapment, as far as she can tell, so it probably isn’t a blowin, which is good. “This is going to hurt,” she says, and presses firmly with two fingers. Matt makes a noise, choked-off in his throat, and she can almost see him focusing and suppressing a reflexive recoil.

“It’s not broken,” he says, lips barely moving.

“What?” she says, because she’d gathered as much, but given how often Matt gets beaten up and the extent of the bruising he’s taken, it’s a surprise that he can even differentiate sensations besides “pain” and “more pain”.

“I can’t hear bone chips,” Matt says, and she rolls her eyes, because go figure. Of course he can hear injuries.

“What do they sound like?” she asks.

“Chalk,” he says, which isn’t particularly evocative to her, but then she did ask.

“Just as well,” she says. “Not a lot I can do for that kind of fracture in my kitchen anyway.” She glances at the kit, open and taking up most of the tabletop. “Anyway open reduction and internal fixation on facial fractures is really something you don’t want to chance on some backroom hackjob.”

“Can’t risk the moneymaker,” Matt agrees, and that’s when she realizes that he’s still pressing forward into her hand, eyes downcast and half-lidded. Curious, she flexes her fingers, and he pushes against them even harder, eyes closing.

The moment doesn’t break, particularly, but Claire suddenly realizes that she’s barely breathing, and Matt’s chest is rising and falling in a way she remembers from that very first night, when she saw the blood on the tarmac and could barely make him out in the flickering streetlight and thought, well, this is it. I’m going to do the right thing and he’ll still die and I won’t be able to do anything about it, and that’ll be it, and I’ll be over. That’ll be it.

Hell’s Kitchen isn’t cruel, but it has no tolerance for personal failure. Claire can think of someone else who’s like that.

“Matt,” she starts, not sure of how to go on anyway, and just like that, he leans away, face back to the wiped-clean blank that she imagines he wears on the rooftops and the fire escapes, when there’s nobody for him to snarl at and nobody to reassure. “You should get an ice pack on that,” she says instead. “It’ll help with the swelling and the pain.”

“Pass,” Matt says, and tilts his head, smiling faintly. “I can cope.”

“You come to me for my medical expertise,” Claire says.

“And for your dinosaur band-aids,” Matt says.

“And so that you don’t permanently damage yourself,” Claire says, persisting despite her sudden overwhelming conviction that Matt is secretly looking for a way to take all the aches and hurts of Hell’s Kitchen — and not just its people, but the city itself, the potholes in the streets and the gas main leaks and the anguished scream of subway brakes — into himself. Matt wants to take on the pain of the people he cares about, because he thinks he can weather it all, and that by acquiring their transgressions and their injustices, he can mark himself as irredeemable and save them all.

“I’m not that concerned about that,” Matt says, and Claire feels anger flare in her chest, rise behind her eyes, because of course not. Of course he doesn’t think about what that would do to the people who care about him — and she knows they exist, if only because she’s one of them, in the compartmentalized way she has when she knows something’s a bad idea, and can’t stop thinking about it anyway — and to the neighborhood, to the people who have started whispering about the man in the mask, who hears you if you scream and doesn’t look the other way. It’s amazing, she thinks, how much you can hurt other people without even realizing it when you think you are beyond salvation.

“You’re angry,” Matt says, breaking in, and she doesn’t ask how he knows. It could be her heartbeat, the increased force behind her exhaled sigh, or simply the way she’s moving, which is much more controlled and restrained than it was a minute ago.

“Yes,” she says, clipped, because it doesn’t matter what she says anyway. “You’re not willing to consider that you might matter.”

“I matter,” Matt says, a little curious, but still eminently reasonable. “I have a very specific skillset which I apply to solve problems other people can’t.”

“You’re not just — you’re not a mission,” Claire says, engaging against not only her better instincts, but her worse ones, and in fact every rational bone in her body. She slumps into the other chair. “You’re not just — a collection of verbs, I don’t know, I don’t care how much of a crusade you’re on. You’re a person too, you know.”

Matt actually appears to consider that for a minute, and when he draws breath and opens his mouth, no doubt with some aggravating rejoinder, she preempts him by placing a gloved thumb over his mouth, parting his lips slightly. “Nasty bruise you’ll have there too,” she says, pressing a little where his lip is beginning to clot. It’s swelling, too, though not as badly as his eye, and she can feel his breath through the glove, the curve of his half-smile, a real one this time, so it’s not a surprise when he leans into the touch, eyes falling closed, tilting his head for more pressure.

“Matt,” she says again, and he hums in response, and she feels that too in his exhale, and she realizes she doesn’t have words for her questions, for the sense of inevitability — almost gravity — filtering everything, the lamplight, the honk of a lone and lost yellow cab outside. She knows how this ends.

Instead of articulating the moment, Claire peels off her gloves and reaches for his hand, traces her fingertips over his dusty knuckles, his calluses, the hollow of his palm, and when he closes his fingers around hers she lifts her hand to her face. His follows, tracing from her temple down along and under the line of her jaw, thumb resting at the corner of her mouth, and she leans into his touch too, pressing her lips to the pad of his thumb.

When he leans in to kiss her, it almost feels like an afterthought. It’s the barest press of his lips, the copper on his breath the strongest sensation, and she slides a hand around to the back of his neck and chases it. It reminds her of nothing so much as a wine tasting, that first half-glass, except that he presses back and puts himself into the kiss. She never feels that he’s anywhere but completely present; simply that he’s — like a starving man, readjusting to something that other people simply accept as a matter of course. He brushes his knuckles over her collarbones, follows the scoop neck of her shirt, and pauses, fingers pressed to her breastbone.

“Claire,” he says, and she’s never heard anyone say her name like that, as if it’s gold under his tongue, precious and holy, an offering.

She takes it, pressing his hand to her chest, and he slips out of his chair and onto his knees, curling his other hand around her calf, thumb rubbing circles against her bare skin, head bowed. Claire slips her hand into his hair, tugs lightly, and he says “yes,” and “please,” and when she curls down to kiss him this time he kisses her as though he’s drowning. When she pulls away, breathless, he curls into her lap, and tilts his head up at her, hands at her waist, fingertips barely brushing under her shirt, and pauses.

“Yes,” Claire says, “if you’re asking for permission, yes.”

“Thank you,” Matt breathes, and she lifts her hips to help him tug her shorts down and off. He tugs her forward, to the edge of the chair, and just pauses for a moment, and Claire remembers how he tasted copper on the air and realizes what he’s doing. He’s breathing her in, and the thoght makes her breath hitch. He smiles up at her, and it’s a smile she hasn’t seen before. It’s not the smile he deploys so that she’ll let him brew coffee, even though it’s three in the morning, or the one that she catches him wearing when he thinks she isn’t looking. He looks like he’s at peace, as if he knows that he’s exactly where he’s meant to be, entirely certain, and he drags two fingers through the spreading wet spot between her legs, pressing through fabric and and curling them in to make her gasp, rubbing slow, broad circles around her clit.

“Good?” Matt says, and Claire laughs incredulously.

“You’re asking?” she says. When he nods, that same smile on his face, she says “God, yes,” and he presses an open-mouthed kiss to the inside of her thigh, stubble scraping against her skin, moving up her gracilis and pausing to tug at the elastic with his teeth.

“We can take these off,” Claire says, and lifts her hips again, and Matt pauses again, just breathing, before he finally kisses her, and it’s as delicate as that first kiss was, just over the bone, with the tip of his tongue, tasting her. He nuzzles her from back to front, lips parted, and then does it again, tongue flattened and broad, licking into her, and when he finds the pressure that makes her rock forward into his mouth, he does it again and again.

It’s wonderful, and Claire does her best to show it, twisting her fingers tighter into Matt’s hair, and he looks up, wordlessly seeking approval again, and she traces the bruise ringing his eye again, barely pressing into the discoloration. Matt presses forward hard again, breath coming faster now, and she strokes down to his mouth, wet and shiny now, to press at that bruise too.

When she tangles both hands into his hair, Matt smiles against her in earnest now and flicks his tongue over her clit so lightly that she could cry. “Fingers,” she gasps, “please,” and he responds immediately, two fingers so easily, and she rocks up into that pressure too. It feels like she can’t get enough breath into her lungs, and she wraps a leg over his shoulder so she can pull him even closer. It’s only when he gasps and leans into her thigh that she realizes it’s on his bad side, against his bruised cheekbone, and he sucks a kiss directly over her clit, sloppy now, and changes the angle of his fingers.

It’s still not enough, somehow, and Claire gasps. “Let me,” she says, “Matthew, can I—”

He pulls back just enough to say “Anything, anything,” and presses back in, and she rocks desperately up against his mouth, his fingers, pulls until she has him exactly where she wants him, and directs him with her hands in his hair, and pressure against his bruises, until she’s arching, hips trembling with the effort of pushing forward until she chokes back a cry and shakes apart. He takes her through it, soft licks until she pushes him away, tipping her head back and gasping for air.

Matt’s still on his knees when she looks back down, and she tips his head up with two fingers under his chin, runs her thumb along his lower lip, admiring his flush and the way his mouth looks — used, she realizes, and he flushes even more as she does it, which promises to be interesting.

“Come here,” she says, and pulls him to his feet. Even standing, Matt somehow gives the sense that he’s looking up at her, even when she’s the one with her head tilted back; even fully clothed, while she pulls her shirt over her head, there’s no doubt about the way he says “Claire,” again, almost lost in the whisper of fabric.

“Yes,” she says, and slides her hands up his throat to frame his face to feel him lean into her touch, letting himself be held. “Yes.”

She knows how this will end, and she has made, for the moment, her peace with it.


End file.
